nancy are long-standing priorities for Washington State’s Department of Health (DOH) and Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS). Working together to ensure that all pregnancies are intended (consciously and clearly desired at the time of conception), the two agencies provide family planning counseling and a broad choice of contraceptive methods through a range of health and social serv...

Out of 100 teenage girls attending a sexually transmitted disease clinic for the first time, 77 were found to be using a reliable method of contraception and had similar characteristics to teenage girls attending a family planning clinic. The 23 girls not using any reliable contraception exhibited a different pattern of sexual behaviour and were at high risk of unplanned pregnancy. Subsequently...

Forecasting the length of the menstrual cycle and of its phases is an important problem in infertility management and natural family planning. Using repeated measurements of the length of the entire cycle and of the preovular phase provided by a large English database, we describe a Bayesian hierarchical dynamic approach to the problem. A state-space process is used to model the temporal behavi...

BACKGROUND Intercourse results in a pregnancy essentially only if it occurs during the 6-day fertile interval ending on the day of ovulation. The strong association between timing of intercourse within this interval and the probability of conception typically is attributed to limited sperm and egg life times. METHODS A total of 782 women recruited from natural family planning centres in Europ...

Small hand-held microscopes have been developed for self-observation of salivary ferning patterns to detect the fertile time of a woman's menstrual cycle. The purpose of this study was to evaluate one such microscope, the Lady Free Biotester, by comparing it with the self-observation of cervical-vaginal mucus and with the self-detection of luteinizing hormone (LH) in the urine. Twelve natural f...

This was a multicentred, prospective study of pregnancies among women using natural family planning. The women maintained natural family planning charts of the conception cycle, recording acts of intercourse and signs of ovulation (cervical mucus changes, including peak day and basal body temperature). Charts were used to assess the most probable day of insemination relative to the day of ovula...